The Lost Battles Read online

  The confrontation in the Great Council Hall made Florence, said an eyewitness, “the school of the world.” It was a spectacle that drew artists from all over Italy and beyond to admire the heights of ingenuity to which Leonardo and Michelangelo were driven by their rivalry.

  Daniele da Volterra, Bust of Michelangelo, 1564–6. This work by a pupil is faithful to the tragic sensibility of Michelangelo at the end of his long life.

  Francesco Melzi, attrib., Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1515. Melzi was Leonardo’s close friend and loyal pupil, and his drawing seems to justify Renaissance references to the polymath’s physical beauty. (illustration credit itr.1) (illustration credit itr.2)

  Out of it came a new idea of “genius”—of the artist as an enigmatic original—in which we still believe today. It was in this competition that artists were first fully and openly recognised, not as artisans doing a job of work, but as godlike creators of the new.

  The Renaissance is an important moment in history not just because it gave us so much beautiful art, so many fine works of literature, so many great buildings. It is important because, as the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt argued in 1860 in his classic work The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, this culture gave birth to the modern individual. The self striving for fulfilment is a Renaissance concept that still describes our lives. There is no clearer evidence of its genesis than the contest between Leonardo and Michelangelo.

  This drama takes us to Florence, cultural capital of the Renaissance world, to behold titanic egos in collision. It is a spectacle of sublime ambition and low cunning, of great minds and petty dislikes, of genius stepping off its plinth to live among the flawed passions of a city of flesh and blood. The newborn modern self is about to take the stage in all its agony and ecstasy.

  PART ONE

  Genius in the Streets

  1503–4

  ONE

  The Insult

  In the autumn of 1504 Leonardo da Vinci made an inventory of his wardrobe. He had to leave Florence on a military mission, and so he stored some of his most precious possessions in two chests at a monastery, one of which contained his books. But if his reading material offers insights into his mind, his handwritten description of the contents of the other box gives us a uniquely intimate glimpse of his daily existence.

  Leonardo wrote his clothing inventory in a notebook (known today as Madrid Codex II) which he carried around with him from 1503 to 1505 and filled with notes that abound with insight into his life in Florence in those years. His inventory brings us disconcertingly close to the very skin of this Renaissance dandy:

  One gown of taffeta

  One lining of velvet that can be used as a gown

  One Arab cloak

  One gown of dusty rose

  One pink Catalan gown

  One dark purple cape, with big collar and hood of velvet

  One gown of Salaì, laced à la Française

  One cape à la Française, that was Duke Valentino’s, of Salaì

  One Flemish gown, Salaì’s

  One purple satin overcoat

  One overcoat of crimson satin, à la Française

  Another overcoat of Salaì, with cuffs of black velvet

  One dark purple camel-hair overcoat

  One pair of dark purple tights

  One pair of dusty-rose tights

  One pair of black tights

  Two pink caps

  One grain-coloured hat

  One shirt of Reims linen, worked à la Française

  This is an exquisite’s costume chest. Not the least striking of its contents are four garments specified as “di Salaì”—meaning that Leonardo’s clothes were mixed up with those of his workshop assistant Salaì. In the sixteenth century it was said this Salaì “was most attractive in grace and beauty, having beautiful hair, curly and bright, in which Leonardo delighted much.” Salaì first joined the workshop as an apprentice in 1490, when he was ten; his master was shocked to find the boy an accomplished thief, taking money out of his own and friends’ purses, and bitterly summed up the kid’s personality as “thief, liar, obstinate, glutton.” But by the early 1500s Salaì—whether or not his character had improved—was the unquestioned leader of Leonardo’s workshop, and people who needed to speak to the absent-minded genius found themselves dealing with this young man whose curly hair and slightly podgy face make him look in drawings by Leonardo like a decadent young Roman emperor. The list of clothes reveals how close they were: there’s even an alteration where “di Salaì” was added later, as if there were some dispute over who owned what.

  Yet the garments ascribed to Salaì are far more conventional than Leonardo’s own clothes. The coat with black velvet cuffs that belongs to the assistant could have come straight out of numerous sixteenth-century portraits of stylish young men, such as the disdainful individual in black portrayed by Lorenzo Lotto in 1506–8 against a white curtain that emphasises his severe dress. When Salaì went around in clothes that were obviously expensive yet muted in hue, he showed fashionably restrained good taste. Leonardo by contrast dressed almost exclusively in pink and purple, a delicate palette that harmonised with his own paintings. It was as if he were a character escaped from a fresco.

  Surely this was a deliberate badge of professional identity—wearing colours that might have been mixed in his own workshop. Leonardo believed in painting as a vocation, an ethos, a way of life. The painter, he exulted, “sits in front of his work well-dressed and moves a very light brush with lovely colours, and is adorned with clothes as he pleases …” He mentions the painter’s excellent clothes and freedom of dress twice in this passage, which also stresses that painting is the manipulation of colour. In fact Leonardo’s taste in dress was of a piece with his aspirations as a painter. From his very earliest works, one of his overriding fascinations is with how oil paints can reproduce the transparencies and opacities, folds and twists, brightness and darkness of textiles. Among the first drawings that can be ascribed to him are studies of drapery which convey not just the weight of cloth as it hangs in mountainous creases, the shadowy valleys between folds, but the very grain of woven fabric. In his youthful Annunciation, both Mary and the angel are decked out in garments of almost curdling richness and a colour range of great complexity and power. Mary has blue skirts which turn into a robe covering her right shoulder, a glow of gold satin at her elbow and over her midriff, and beneath all this, a red dress with pale purple belt and collar. The angel wears a white tunic tied at the arm with a violet ribbon, a drapery of green, and long, dark red robes. It is as if they were waiting patiently while Leonardo draped them according to his fantasy—for Mary’s blue skirts are not really skirts at all but an enormous cloth he has arranged on her shoulder and legs, spreading it over a chair arm whose form becomes an enigmatic bulge.

  From the clinging dresses of goddesses carved on the pediment of the Parthenon in fifth-century-B.C. Athens to the precious work of Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio with its ribbons fluttering in the air, textiles swag the history of art. Yet no one has ever painted clothes quite as consummately as Leonardo. If he does have predecessors, they are the Gothic painters of fifteenth-century Germany and the Netherlands. The massive capaciousness of Leonardo’s draperies, the apparently arbitrary spread and redundant quantity of cloth, resembles the heavy fabrics of North European art. There are strange rewards for the curious eye in watching him pour deep shadows down valleys of satin, weaving mysterious daydreams and conjuring phantom forms in an art that begins by dwelling on powerfully coloured, ornately folded draperies and evolves to encompass the most gossamer of translucent gauzes.

  This evolution is apparent in the first and second versions of his composition The Virgin of the Rocks, which he first painted in the 1480s and then re-created in a picture still unfinished in 1506. The earlier version has an angel swathed in bright, bulky red and green satin; the angel in the later painting wears a sleeve whose gold-embroidered tracery floats on transparent layers of
light-filled, colourless material gradually forming into a white creaminess. It is a stupefyingly intricate effect—precisely the type of challenge Leonardo sought as a painter, although how much of this second version is by his own hand will never be certain. In The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, which he worked on more or less to the end of his life, he again gives the Virgin a semi-transparent filigree sleeve. Having learned from the Gothic-tinged training of his youth in 1460s and ’70s Florence to depict draperies with a crisp attention to their folds, he became in his maturity obsessed with the ambiguous semi-transparency of gauzes and veils.

  That is how Leonardo hangs clothes on women and angels. Women appear in far more of his surviving paintings than men do—four portraits of women exist by him. Even Ginevra de’ Benci, who posed for one of his earliest and plainest paintings in about 1474, sports a black velvet scarf that contrasts sensually with her simple brown dress and pale skin. There’s only one portrait of a man, a young musician whose costume isn’t especially interesting or well preserved.

  There is, however, one painting by Leonardo that is full of male figures nobly robed. The Last Supper started to rot and flake the second he set down his brush for the last time in the monks’ canteen of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in 1497–8. Restorations and repaintings over the centuries added layer on layer of glue and pigment to try and preserve what people thought—long after living memory was lost—the picture must have looked like. The most recent (perhaps quixotic) restoration pared away these later layers to get as close as possible to the “original” paint. The fragmented result is infinitely paler and drier than any of the artist’s better-preserved paintings, with scarcely a hint of the low-toned ambiguities he loved. While this makes it hard to interpret the appearance of the clothes, it is apparent that he arranged the men’s robes as freely and sculpturally as he layered satins and gauzes on his female models. At the far end of the table on our left, Bartholomew stands up from his seat in shock at Christ’s revelation that one of the disciples will shortly betray him; the heavy green robe over his thin blue tunic gathers in a bunch on his shoulder and hangs in the air, defying gravity as impossibly as the crinkly satin garments that float unsupported in Leonardo’s later Virgin and Child with St. Anne.

  Look again at the same disciple. What is the green drapery I’ve called a robe? It falls in a mass onto the table, bunches extravagantly on Bartholemew’s back, and is piled around his lower body. It is just as wilful and gratuitous as the voluminous skirts of the Virgin in his youthful Annunciation. In fact all the disciples at Leonardo’s table are just as artfully clad. What is the garment slung over one shoulder of the feminine-looking John, seated at Christ’s right hand? It is simply a loose cloth, there at the painter’s whim and as pink as the clothes in his own wardrobe. Further along the table, James the Minor’s crinkly shift is also pink.

  Long before he painted this heroic and tragic scene, Leonardo drew the portrait of an executed criminal. He was still in his twenties when, in December 1479, he stood in the high, narrow courtyard of the Palace of the Podestà—today’s Bargello Museum—in Florence and recorded the appearance of a hanged man in a few perfect pen strokes. Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli swings, in Leonardo’s drawing, from a rope that inclines, like his mirror-inverted writing, leftward on the page. The dead man’s hands are tied behind his back and his legs hang limply. The terrible thing about him is his face. The eyes are deep dark voids, already looking like the empty sockets of a skull. The skin, Leonardo suggests in a couple of lines, is discoloured. There are clear signs of rot and postmortem decay on this face, the only part of Baroncelli’s body that is naked.

  The rest of his body may be equally emaciated and skeletal, but it looks more alive, more human, because every part of it except the face is concealed by clothes. Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli was hanged in Florence in the last days of 1479 for his part in a conspiracy that had claimed the life of Giuliano de’ Medici, brother to the city’s ruler, Lorenzo the Magnificent. It was said that Baroncelli plunged the first dagger into the victim, but while his fellow conspirators rapidly suffered horrible retribution, he escaped to Constantinople. When he was finally dragged back from the Ottoman city, he was hanged still wearing the Turkish coat and slippers in which he had disguised himself.

  Leonardo dwells on the assassin’s exotic clothes, already a bit big for the corpse that shrinks within their bulk. He captures with his pen the soft folds of a long coat, the distinctive bobble buttons on its collar, and its fringe of fur. He records the executed assassin’s slippers and skullcap and tights. In a note written as a column next to the swaying body he gives precise descriptions of each garment:

  A little tan cap

  A black satin doublet

  A black jerkin with a lining

  A Turkish jacket lined

  with foxes’ throat fur,

  and the collar of the jacket

  covered with velvet stippled

  black and red;

  Bernardo di Bandino

  Baroncelli;

  black tights.

  Although this was written a quarter of a century before Leonardo’s inventory of his own clothes, the mature artist’s list contains a peculiar echo of the youthful drawing, which lingers with fascination on the dress of a hanged criminal.

  Among the clothes Leonardo placed in a chest for safekeeping in 1504 he mentions “one cape in French style, which belonged to Duke Valentino; of Salaì.” “Duke Valentino” was the name by which contemporaries knew Cesare Borgia—son of the Pope and commander of the papal armies, who cut a terrifying path through central Italy in the first years of the sixteenth century as he conquered one small city-state after another in his drive to build an empire for his family. Borgia had menaced Florence itself; his men perpetrated atrocities in its countryside. To most Florentine citizens in 1504, his name was diabolical; a diarist called him “this serpent.” But for Leonardo, this murderous prince was apparently as darkly seductive as the hanged assassin had once been. Why else dress Salaì in Valentino’s old clothes?

  It is no small thing to be able to list the exact clothes a particular human being wore in everyday life half a millennium ago. The 1504 inventory of Leonardo’s wardrobe is the next-best thing to possessing the clothes themselves. It is an archaeological fragment that allows us to reconstruct one part of his physical being, to see what he wore as he walked the streets of Florence. In fact his notebooks abound in odd physical details of his life. Sometimes there will be a list of groceries, or calculations of household expenses. All such glimpses delight. But the inventory of his clothes is special because it lends startling substance to one of the most amazing, even embarrassing, anecdotes that sixteenth-century gossips told about him.

  The book is a lovely thing to hold, like touching a pebble worn smooth by the sea. A creamy-white binding, flattened and honed by time, swings open to reveal paper whose yellowed edges and soft textures tell its age. It breathes out its four-and-a-half centuries (and more) when opened, as when an ancient attic is unlocked and the trespasser coughs on dust. The slippery, leathery paper leaves a smell on one’s hands—not unpleasant. Each page is printed in thick black type. The title page is designed like a fantastic window, with robed women supporting a marble pediment upon which play little winged boys, holding between them a shield emblazoned with six spheres. Through the window, beneath the shield, one can see a walled city in a hilly landscape, dominated by a vast cathedral dome and a formidable fortress.

  In the time-stained sky above the city framed by the window is the book’s title and author:

  LA TERZA ET

  ULTIMA PARTE

  DELLE VITE DE

  GLI ARCHITETTORI

  PITTORI

  ET SCULTORI

  DI

  GIORGIO VASARI

  ARETINO

  It has been printed and reprinted many times in many languages; there are currently at least three rival popular editions in English, but this is how it first
appeared in the world in 1550. The wondrous artefact we’re admiring in the rare-books room of a great library is the very first edition of the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Vasari’s extravagant, gargantuan literary masterpiece, The Lives of the Architects, Painters, and Sculptors.

  One of the most productive crafts in Renaissance Italy was storytelling. Before Spanish and English writers invented the novel, there were Italy’s novelle—brief tales, tragic or comic, assembled in generous, expansive collections in a genre whose timeless classic is the fourteenth-century Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio’s bawdy masterpiece the Decameron. Shakespeare was to get some of his most famous plots from these Italian story collections: Romeo and Juliet and Othello started their lives in Italian books of novelle. It is tempting to wonder what might have happened if, in addition to the tales of Matteo Bandello in which Romeo and Juliet can be found, Shakespeare had known Vasari’s tales of murderous rivals and star-crossed lovers. Vasari’s book is so rich in narrative that it sometimes seems less a history than a collection of novelle. Although it is full of brilliant descriptions of works of art and acute critical observations, and has a serious argument to make about the progress of culture, its facts are mixed with fiction to a riotous degree.

  Vasari’s “Life of Leonardo da Vinci” is his most intoxicated, and intoxicating, parable of genius, a mythic tale whose hero is super-humanly intelligent. Vasari’s tone is rhapsodic, the man he evokes magical—“marvellous and celestial,” “mirabile e celeste,” was this boy born in 1452 in the country town of Vinci, in the hills to the west of the great art capital that was Florence. One day when he was still a teenager, Vasari tells us, Leonardo was asked by his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, to turn a twisted piece of wood into a shield as a favour for a peasant who worked on the family estates. First Leonardo got the roughly shield-shaped wood smoothed to a convex disc. Then he went out into the countryside to collect the strangest-looking animals he could find: beetles and butterflies, lizards of all shapes and sizes, bats, crickets, and snakes. He killed these animals and took them to his private room, where he started to dissect them and select components of their bodies—wing of bat, claw of lizard, belly of snake … Leonardo took no notice of the growing stench as he worked on these dead animals, stitching bits of them together to create a composite monster. He also added something extra, by means Vasari does not explain, for the monster he made “poisoned with its breath and turned the air to fire.”